


Absolution

by imhereforbvcky



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action & Romance, Action/Adventure, Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Bucky Barnes Goes to Therapy, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Grief, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Heavy Angst, Nightmares, The boy needs some counseling okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 14:20:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17705900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imhereforbvcky/pseuds/imhereforbvcky
Summary: Bucky must figure out how to live with some of his worst memories when he can’t shake one particular ghost from his past.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Murder Song (5,4,3,2,1) by Aurora. I like the acoustic version if you want to get into my headspace for this one.

“James?” His voice was gentle, but a little insistent. Bucky blinked quickly a few times before lifting his eyes toward the doctor.

He must have called his name a few times, judging by the concerned way the doctor's eyebrows drew down just slightly and the gentle urging in his tone.

“Sorry,” Bucky mumbled, not quite meeting his eye. “I’m here.”

“Okay,” the therapist acknowledged calmly. “Want to tell me where you went?”

Bucky’s chest swelled with the deep breath he drew in. He held it, trying to steady himself before releasing it slowly through clenched teeth. He felt the minutes tick by, knowing he needed to say  _something_. He did trust this man, had been pretty honest with him up until this point. But this was the point where things got messy, became… ugly.

“No.”

“Alright,” he answered in a smooth tone, betraying none of the disappointment Bucky knew he must feel. “You know we don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

More time.

More silence.

“Okay, let’s try something else. How have you been sleeping lately? Are you still having the dreams?”

Bucky was quiet again for a moment and shook his head. “Not the same dreams, no.” His eyes lifted up to his therapist briefly before flickering over to the young woman, hovering just behind him. He knew she wasn’t real, just… some hallucination, some grotesque manifestation of his trauma come to taunt him. A guilty memory come back to life. It was she who filled his dreams now instead of rusting iron restraints and frosted glass cages. He remembered the guilt of how he cared for her and what he did to her instead of the terror of the shifting black plates and piercing electric currents. Every second was about her now, awake or asleep.

He’d been silent too long again. The therapist looked at him, waiting, but not expectant any longer. They both knew this session wasn’t going anywhere.

“Alright James, that’s our time for today.” Bucky only nodded his reply, shifting to leave, yet another session where he’d held back, pushed the truth away, hid the things he needed to say. “We’ve done a lot of great work together, and I think there’s more we  _could_  do but I think you’ve been holding back the last several weeks. So this week, I’d like for you to think about your goals for our time here, and when you’re back we can look at how to get there. Sound good?”

Bucky nodded and avoided rolling his eyes. He didn’t blame the guy. It wasn’t his fault. Bucky knew you got out what you gave in to this sort of thing, and in the not so distant past he’d gotten a lot. He’d talked about his memories of Steve and growing up, the night terrors he still had about being reconditioned; the abuse. It was all starting to help.

The dreams had diminished but now they only gave way to something worse… He now remembered the things  _he’d_  done, and he wasn’t entirely sure he deserved absolution. He wasn’t quite ready to let someone help him move past them.

As he paced quickly out of the office, she followed too. “You should tell him.”

How was it possible that her voice was as clear in his head as it had been some 60 odd years ago? It was agony.

“Tell a Mandated Reporter that the assassin living in the middle of New York City, who was  _barely_  pardoned less than a year ago, is also hallucinating? Seems like I should  _not_ tell him.”

“And talking to yourself,” she smirked. Or… the image of her in his mind smirked as he straddled his motorcycle.

“Part and parcel,” he argued.

“He’ll understand,” she soothed. Why was she trying to help him get rid of her? “It’s what he’s paid to do.”

“No, it’s what he’s court ordered to do.”

“Hallucinations of the deceased are a fairly common bereavement experience,” she rattled off. Or did it mean he was thinking it to himself? It was all so confusing and anything where she was concerned made him too nauseous to think clearly. “Complex grief. I think after 70 years of loss and abuse at the caliber you’ve experienced it’s hardly a shocking symptom.”

With a sigh Bucky slipped the helmet over his head, shutting out his new old friend. “Doesn’t mean it’ll end well.”

* * *

_Steve stood beside him with a comforting hand on his shoulder, gripping tighter than he needed to. Bucky’s arms were extended in front of him, his stance sure and strong, the firearm unwavering as he held the barrel flush against her skin. It was her again. It was always her lately. For weeks. She stared at him unblinking, no expression at all as the cold steel pressed against her forehead._

_“What you did all those years…” Steve began. She slowly lifted her hands to circle the barrel, holding it in place, still staring at him relentlessly. There was no other way for this to end. “It wasn’t you.”_

_Bucky could feel the tears on his cheeks, wet, and burning hot. He was shaking, trying to catch his breath. He needed to be quick or he’d devolve into sobs and he’d never get off a clean shot. She shouldn’t suffer._

_There was a rumbling bang and everything went dark._

With eyes tightly closed he embraced the dark for a moment longer; she wasn’t in the dark, only in dreams like this one. And sometimes in his imagination if he was too distracted. He tried to steady his breathing by placing a hand on his chest and focusing on the rise and fall, trying to count it out. There was moisture on his cheeks. Tears. That part of the dream, at least, had been real.

Another bang had him jolting out of bed faster than he could think, all instinct and fear, fresh out of a dream like this. He’d slipped out of his room, keeping flush to the wall and taking long silent strides towards the noise with his thick serrated knife in hand. He wasn’t permitted firearms yet. It was a good thing, he thought.

As he eased into the common area, he saw that the lights were on, which instantly eased his alerted instincts. Someone breaking into the Avengers Tower in the middle of the night would certainly cut the power. Light was a sign of safety.

The muffled curse from behind the counter gave him enough grasp on reality to lower the knife and step into the light.

“Oh Jesus!” Tony hissed, nearly dropping the pan for the 3rd time. “Barnes! You scared the shit out of me.”

Bucky didn’t answer, and Tony took in his appearance: pajamas, but a long thick knife in hand, red-rimmed eyes. It was the tired look he found in them that let him turn his back, moving to the stove and trusting his instincts.

“I was gonna make an omelet but uh…” he glanced at Bucky over his shoulder as Bucky eased onto a stool setting the knife on the island and pushing it a few feet away. “Split a frittata?”

Again, no answer, but they’d run into each other often enough on sleepless nights for him to know that unless Bucky skulked back to his room, he’d take whatever you put in front of him. Neither of them were exactly hungry, but Tony needed something to do with his hands, something to keep him occupied, and Bucky needed people. Someone to just let him be close without asking too many questions.

He usually wound up with Tony or Natasha on nights like this. At first it had been Steve, and Steve still worried to no end, but that was exactly the problem. For as long as Bucky’d known Steve he’s always had a Mr. Fix-It attitude about everything; he had no clue how to just  _be there_. He’d go to Steve if he felt like he was really in trouble, if things were shifting or he might be a danger. Otherwise he preferred the quiet understanding of common experience with Tony and Nat. It didn’t need to be said, they could feel it, read it on each other as if it were their own bodies tensed and reacting to invisible ghosts.

Tony chattered on quietly, tossing veggies in with the eggs. Bucky didn’t mind the talking, it suited them both. Eventually, Tony cut to the chase. “Haven’t heard you much at night, still having nightmares, though?”

Bucky nodded. They were definitely nightmares, even if they didn’t leave him screaming in fear and remembered agony. “Different lately,” was all he managed to say, her memory still so fresh he could taste the gunpowder on his tongue, feel it stinging his nose when he breathed in.

“Your doc think you just gotta work through ‘em?” Tony probed, sliding the messy little frittata onto plates. “Or is he giving you something to help you sleep?”

Bucky gnawed on his lip and spun his fork in his fingers, hesitant and unsure how to answer.

“Oh, c’mon, you’ve gotta tell him.”

“It’s just, this time…” Bucky swallowed some egg. “This time it’s me. I remember… Am I supposed to just let this guy document every awful thing they made me do?”

“If it helps,” Tony gave a slight nod, stuffing a large piece of egg in his mouth. “Have you tried writing it down?” Bucky shook his head. There were things he wrote down, notebooks he kept carefully guarded, slowly filling with memories he wanted to keep. This was not one of them. “Try it. Write down what you remember or what you dreamed and then just give it to your guy. Easier than saying it sometimes.”

Again Bucky had very little to say, the weight of his memories still heavy on his mind. The image of her followed him like an eclipse, blocking out the light of a future free of all this. He offered only a nod as he slid off the stool and rinsed both their plates.

“Okay!” Tony clapped his hands together, “We’ve talked, and now let’s forget. Mario Kart?”

Bucky chuckled softly, drying his hands while leaning on the counter. Forgetting sounded divine. “Yeah, let’s do it.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky shares a few memories of the girl he can't let go with his therapist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by Murder Song (5,4,3,2,1) by Aurora. I like the acoustic version if you want to get into my headspace for this one.

Bucky watched his therapist seated across from him, holding the pages that Bucky had torn out of his journals to share. He could see his own dark heavy hand through the thin pages, and he worried. His hands fidgeted in his lap, as he studied the doctor across the room.

“How did you meet her?” was the only question the man asked. It was so… unassuming that Bucky felt nervous to answer, like it must be some trick.

“Um she… she was there, in Siberia when I woke up from the surgery.” Still no more questions, just… patient listening. “Not there, exactly. She spoke to me, through a drain pipe that ran through the wall between our… cells, I guess.”

“She was a prisoner too?”

He nodded. “There were a handful of them that came and went… She was there already when I woke up.” Bucky swallowed the lump in his throat, remembering all the whispered moments they’d shared. He remembered the desperation they’d each laid bare, unable to hold on any longer, only for the other to breathe hope through a rusting pipe. A voice through a hole in the wall had saved him.

Bucky pointed at the paper settled on top of the pile. “That one’s my first memory of her.”

* * *

**_July 23_ **

_I slept through the night but I dreamed of waking up. There are a few hazy memories between the fall and when I first heard her, but they’re cloudy and they don’t fit together right._

_She said I might never remember them, that I’d been in and out of medical because of the prosthetic. She didn’t know much but she said she’d heard them talk about how well the material was taking, or rather wasn’t taking and then I’d come and go for weeks at a time until they stabilized everything._

_I’d woken in a panic, the memories felt like a muddy dream and there was a machine where my arm should be. She’d called to me through the pipe._

_“Hey, shh! Hey, you’re okay!”_

_I sure as shit wasn’t. I clawed at the sheets and stumbled out of the bed, a sharp burning pain radiated through my shoulder and down my entire spine when I tried to push myself up with the metal arm. I was a soldier, and trained on how to handle captivity, but this… this was more than anyone had ever trained me to handle._

_I think I nearly died of a heart attack right there when cold slender fingers reached out over mine. “Shh! Shh, just breathe,” that soothing murmur insisted. “If they hear you they’ll come sedate you again, they want you to heal.”_

_Finally, she pulled her small bony hand back away through the drain pipe. “There you go,” she encouraged as I dragged myself to sit up, finally settling my breathing into a normal pattern. She offered her name and asked mine. Nervous and taking in my surroundings in a soldier’s survival mode, I rattled off my service number._

_“Okay, you’re a soldier,” she seemed a little worried. For some reason I didn’t want her to worry. “What’s your name, though?”_

_“J-James,” I finally breathed. “James Barnes.”_

_“That’s good.”_

_Was it? Why was that good?_

_“Hang on to that,” she urged, a serious firmness in her tone. “They’re going to try to take it from you, but remember who you are.”_

_“H-how do you know that?” I asked shakily, sweat forming over my skin from the pain of the gruesome seam where my skin met the shining metal prosthetic. “Who are you?”_

_She told me how HYDRA took soldiers and civilians alike, how they’d overtaken her small village and kept those who were fit for their work with Zola. The rest were executed immediately, the lucky ones, she called them._

_“I’ve been here long enough now to see soldiers like you turn to monsters, and to see the ill cured only to try on a new disease or weapon until they’re dead.” Her voice wasn’t cold and removed when she talked about these things. She hadn’t adopted the self-protective dissociation I expected, she was devastated and so, so alone. “It’s easy to forget who you are. To start to think you’re just a piece of lab equipment or a gun. As soon as you do, you’re dead or you’re theirs.”_

* * *

**_July 27_ **

_Sam has food poisoning I’m not surprised; he’ll eat any damn thing he sees. Just the smell from his room is horrifying. Before I can pass his door I see her. I **see**  her. She’s leaning against the wall beside his door, holding her stomach as if her entire body would come apart if she let go. I know she’s not real. I know it’s a guilty projection from my trauma-ridden mind. But god I just want to help her. I can never help her. It’s enough to kick my memories into overdrive and it’s not just a picture in my head, I can smell it and see it and practically feel it._

_I never saw her like that, hunched over and sick, I never saw it. But I remember it.  
_

_She moaned softly when they dropped her body onto the bed in her cell. I could hear the springs whine under the rough treatment. They didn’t say a word as they left. They never did, not to her. There was a loud clang as her door crashed closed._

_“You okay?” I asked her as softly as I could through the pipe. It was best to be gentle when she’d just returned. It was hard to know what horrors she’d seen and sometimes even the sound of my voice startled her._

_A stifled sob was my only reply before the bed creaked again. I heard her heaving and felt my own stomach flip. I hated them. I **hate**  them. All I wanted was to comfort her, to stroke her back gently and whisper that she’d be okay. I couldn’t do either of those things. Neither of us would ever be okay again._

_I have no idea how many nights were spent that way, listening to each other suffer and trying to find any comfort. I won’t call it hope, because after a while there just wasn’t any to be found._

_When she was sick from the testing I’d tell her about Brooklyn, and Coney Island, I told her how I wanted to take her dancing and about my favorite dance halls. I told her about my sister and laughed about what the hell kind of job I would get with a damn metal arm._

_When I came back shattered and lost, not quite myself, echoes of words I didn’t understand lingering at the edges of my memory, she’d talk to me. She’d tell me about her village and what it was like to be from a place where everyone knew each other. I could hear the smile in her voice and wondered how she managed to smile in a place like that, after everything. I think she only did it for me. Or maybe I just want to think that. I loved her, I think._

* * *

“I can see you really care for her,” Bucky’s therapist told him, looking up from the pages in his hands.

Bucky nodded, pushing his hands into his hair anxiously. “I don’t even know how much time we had together, really. I don’t remember all of it. I hate that they took that from me, too.”

“It doesn’t have to be about the time, James.” He had that gentle urging voice on again. “We can form extraordinary bonds under extraordinary circumstances. Even if it was only a short time or–”

“It was years,” Bucky interrupted, “I know that. When I… When she died I had already been there long enough for the trigger words to work.”

“I’m sorry, James. It must have been difficult to lose her.”

“You haven’t even read it yet,” Bucky eyed him, slightly apprehensive.

“I can see how much you cared for her, regardless of what’s on this paper,” he lifted the pages like they were nothing, like they didn’t contain his patient’s worst memories. “Her loss is still painful for you.”

“I can’t get her out of my head.” Bucky chewed on his lip, staring at his hands in his lap, silent for a long moment. He could feel the doctor’s eyes on him, patient and understanding. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath, “I loved her. I loved her and I killed her.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky faces the worst of his memories of the woman in the cell next door and with Tony's help, finds some closure.

**_August 1_ **

_I had the dream again. The whole dream. It comes back to me again and again. Sometimes if I’m lucky I wake up and the whole memory doesn’t replay in my head like a broken record. When I’m lucky I don’t wake up with her voice in my head begging me for death; absolving me of the thing I could never ask forgiveness for._

_Every time I wake up, I remember pulling the trigger._

_She had been sick for days, I mean really sick. I told her every story I could think of just to keep her conscious. I asked her questions I already knew the answer to so I could gauge whether she was delirious. I begged her to eat but it was pointless, she couldn’t keep anything down. Eventually they’d taken her away. All I could do was worry about her, and do all the things she would have encouraged me to do to survive, hoping she’d come back._

_She never did. Instead they came for me a few days later, shoved a gun in my hand and pushed me into a bright room. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that room now that I remember it again._

_I blinked against the bright spotlights that somehow made the dingy cement seem to glow. Rooms like this weren’t unfamiliar to me. Rooms like these dominated my life here. It was where they filled my head with words that turned my body into a machine I didn’t know how to operate. It was where they tested the strength of those words with increasing cruelty. It was in rooms like these where my nightmares became a reality; or rather I became the nightmare._

_This time though, there was only a woman in the room. Clearly another prisoner. She looked so incredibly frail. She was just skin and bones, and her skin had that thin ashen blue tint that’s almost always the calling card for death._

_She looked at me and I will always be haunted by it. Though her heart still beat, and I could see her breathing, it was a ghost who looked back at me. A ghost with tired eyes that reflected only an immeasurable well of pain._

_Worse still, when her eyes flickered over me and she glimpsed the metal of my arm glistening under the harsh light and the dark metal of the gun in my hand she seemed… relieved._

_“Bucky,” she rasped and stepped closer, a warmth gathering in the pools of her eyes._   _The second I heard her voice I knew it was her: the woman in the cell beside mine, my only companion and friend, my solace and sanity when this place and these people tried to take it from me._

_I’d never seen her before, but she must have recognized me for the metal arm. I whispered her name when she moved even closer and lifted the cool metal into her own hands, those small hands that I’d only seen pushing through a drainage pipe in my wall to offer me support. I spun the metal hand over to hold onto her, not daring to lift my right because for a moment she looked comforted and the cool metal handgun I was holding at my side would surely bring an end to that._

_“Test P2405 to commence in Chamber 4b.” A voice rang over the speakers. I looked around, spotting the theater of lab coats above with a row of guards, their rifles trained down on us._

_“Bucky, listen to me,” she urged, her fingers sliding higher up my arm. Her hand tentatively settling on my chest brought my attention back to her face._

_“Test subject: Winter Soldier,” the voice-over continued._

_“This is a trial for you, not for me,” she sounded urgent, like this was the only thing that mattered to her on earth._

_I only shook my head, refusing to accept the reality in front of me. I wouldn’t be able to do it. “They want me to hurt you.”_

_“I know, Bucky,” she soothed, “But you won’t. I’m already hurting, don’t you see?”_

_Her hands gripped my metal arm tighter and I forced myself to look at her again. I knew it was true. They’d hurt her the second they dragged her from her home and destroyed her village. Every time she left her cell meant more pain. She’d been brave and strong, and now here when she had no way out, she still used that pain to ease my own._

_I squeezed my eyes shut as I heard the words begin to echo through the room._

_“Желание. Pжaвый”_

_“It’s a gift Bucky,” she tried again when she heard the anguished growl from me, trying everything I could think of to hold it back, this monster they’d put in my head. “It’s mercy. You can… you can do it quick?” she asked, voice trembling, I looked at her despite the pain squeezing my chest and the knot in my throat. She was trembling all over._

_“Добросердечный.”_

_Shit. I don’t know how they got so far so fast. I could feel a shift, it was happening despite everything in me screaming for it to stop. My voice was raw. I must have been actually screaming until I felt her ball her fists into my shirt and press herself even closer against me._

_“Bucky, listen to me,” she urged, sounding stronger than I thought possible by the look of her. “I’m dead either way. You will be the one to suffer if you don’t do this, not me. Just–”_

_“You think I won’t suffer if I do this?” I asked, gripping her by the back of her neck, trying to be gentle with her, but needing to feel her, needing to feel something that wasn’t iron and ice. I needed to hold on to something soft and warm for as long as I could._

_“Один.”_

_“You have to be the soldier, Bucky. That’s the best you can do for me now,” she was pleading with me, tears streaming down her cheeks now, “Be the soldier, be efficient, and let the blame fall on their shoulders.” Her eyes darted to the gallery of monsters before flitting back to me, pleading and sad. “Please.”_

_She kissed me quickly, clinging to me, needing her last memory to be something less ugly than the life we’d both known the last several years. I would have held onto her like that for a lifetime if I could._

_“Грузовой вагон.”_

_I could only watch her breathing pick up pace, like she was struggling for every ounce of oxygen as my body shifted, releasing her and rising to a rigid position. I wish there had been any way to convey to her that I was sorry, that I didn’t want to do this, that I wished I could have protected her, but I was a prisoner in my own body._

_“Mercy is a gift,” she whispered, closing her eyes against the harsh commands coming my way. Maybe she didn’t want to remember me like this. Maybe she didn’t want me to remember her fear. I can’t forget it though, she may have closed her eyes and stood as tall as she could in that weakened body, she may have given me permission and called it mercy, but I remember._

_“Cолдат?”_

_“Я готов отвечать.”_

_“Убей bаша девушка.”_

_That’s the thing about being under mind control that nobody talks about… You’re still in there. Some small piece of you is awake… **watching**_ **.** _Like being a passenger in your own body. You struggle to break free… but you lose… over and over again… you lose.*_

_I lost everything watching my body take an aggressive stance, watching my arms rise, gripping the gun with the familiarity of an expert and press it to her forehead. She was still so close. I don’t know if she was too afraid to move, or if she really didn’t care in the end. I guess it didn’t matter because she was dead in an instant when I pulled the trigger._

_The worst part was watching her body crumple to the floor while I stepped back and handed the gun to a guard. I knew they were displeased by the tears on my face, but even in this state there was nothing I could do to stop them. There was no one else there to mourn her; to remember her, to scream at the injustice, to weep at the loss. And she deserved at least that._

_She was my first kill as the Winter Soldier and I’ll never forget her. I’m unable to forget the awful things, but I make myself remember the good about her. She deserves that, too._

* * *

Three weeks later on another late frittata night, Tony had excitedly slid Bucky a large legal envelope with her name written in the corner in Tony’s small, efficient hand.

“I found your girl!” he told Bucky around a mouthful of egg and bell pepper. “But I gotta ask, is she…?”

“Yeah,” Bucky sighed heavily, holding the package in his hands like it was a bomb that might set him off if he opened it too quickly or too roughly.

“Do you really think it’s a good idea to chase this down?” Tony asked, skeptically. “I mean, I think we both know from experience here that her family might not want you–”

“Her family’s gone.”

Tony nodded, not quite sure what that meant. For all he knew they’d also met their end at the hands of the Winter Soldier, but that wasn’t the man before him. The man sitting at his counter was hunched over a relic from the past, pained and lost.

“This one haunts you, huh?” Tony probed gently.

“More than you know.”

* * *

Only days later the pair of dysfunctional Avengers wound up in a rented car from the mid 1990s driving through an endless sea of uncultivated fields somewhere in northeastern Europe, looking for a village that the world preferred to forget.

“I don’t think this is right,” Tony sighed, completely flustered that his technology had no record of their destination, nor of this road, if you could call it that. “There’s nothing back here but more dirt and grass. We haven’t even passed a potato in like, 5 miles, there are no villages here.”

“Not anymore,” Bucky agreed, “But we passed that oak tree by the river, this has to be right.”

“There are trees by  _every_  river, Barnes, that’s what they  _do_.”

“There!” Bucky pointed to a small cluster of old buildings in the distance, the wood greyed with age and buckling under their own weight with rot.

He stopped the car and climbed out slowly, taking the envelope with him. He walked cautiously at first, with his hand outstretched over the tall wheat colored grass tickling his palm. Tony followed at a distance; for once, not saying a word.

Bucky ran his hands over the wood trim of one of the buildings, feeling the smooth worn grain of it, as he imagined her hands in this exact spot, at home, laughing as she chased down that chicken that had gotten loose. She’d told him about every detail of this place and he’d built a picture in his head, but this… was an echo, a skeleton of the life it once held.

He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, an overwhelming sense of loss taking hold of him, not just for her, but for all that HYDRA had taken from this place. The warm sun on his shoulders, and the rich earth at his feet reminded him with distinct potency of the magnitude of war.

He took another breath, memorizing the smell, earthy and simple: warm thick air, dry wild grass, cool black dirt. It’s what she should have smelled like, here, in her home, away from the harsh chemicals constantly in and around her body, the taste of blood staining her lips and iron hemming her in. It’s what she should have smelled like without the stench of HYDRA.

“Hey, I think I got something.” Tony’s voice was gentle, like he didn’t want to disturb a single speck of dirt.

Bucky walked over to meet him. In the apparent center of the abandoned village stood a series of boulders with names carved into them. He knelt in front of one of the stones and ran his fingertips over her name.

“You okay?” Tony asked.

Bucky nodded, unsure how to answer. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find here, but it was crushing to see her name on this stone, in a list of so many others. He wondered how many had gone with her to the same base in Siberia where he’d met her and how many had never made it past the walls of this small village.

A part of him was relieved. He was glad someone had remembered her, had grieved for her when he’d been unable, and had memorialized her like this. His own instability following her death had lead HYDRA to begin their crude efforts to clear his memory. He hadn’t remembered her at all before Wanda had begun digging in his brain to remove the triggers. Now he couldn’t get her out of his head.

“I just can’t let her go.”

“Goodbyes like this don’t happen overnight,” Tony suggested, squeezing Bucky’s shoulder. “If you’re hanging on to her memory, there’s gotta be something there you still need to work out.”

Bucky nodded, taking Tony’s outstretched hand and pulling himself back to his feet. Tony reached into his pocket and took out a piece of scrap paper and a piece of charcoal vine that he’d snatched from Steve's art kit and passed it to Bucky.

“What’s this?”

“How old  _are_  you?” He couldn’t resist the urge to tease a little, “It’s a rubbing. Here.” He took the paper back and covered her name with the it before pressing the charcoal against the engraved stone, brushing back and forth until her name appeared clearly in white against the black background coal.

Bucky stared at the paper in his hands, transfixed. It was small, and messy, the charcoal already staining his fingers, but it was her.

“Put it in your notebook,” Tony advised, “Be careful not to smudge it until Steve can get some fixative on it, that charcoal will smear, but it leaves a clearer print.” He patted Bucky on the shoulder harshly before turning back towards the car.

“You’ve done this before,” Bucky observed.

“You’re not the only one who’s lost someone.” Tony turned with a raised eyebrow. Bucky followed him back through the grass, smearing black coal across the edges of the page he still wasn’t ready to relinquish.

“Know what? I learned something pretty valuable on this trip,” Tony mused, talking over his shoulder as they meandered through the field.

“What’s that?”

“You’ve been holding out on me. I’ve been making us frittatas every night, but  _you_  can make some killer latkes!” He teased, and Bucky couldn’t help the laugh that burst from his chest. The last sound he expected to hear in a place like this, much less from his own lips, but it felt right, like this place had a life and a voice for even a fleeting moment before it returned to its solemn memoriam. “We’re trading off from now on.”

“I can live with that,” Bucky agreed. “It’s her recipe.” He laughed softly a long moment later, enjoying the idea. “After a few years we ran out of interesting things to say so I told her about my mom’s meatballs and how I never learned to cook and she told me how to make her grandmother’s latkes.”

“Latkes it is then,” Tony smiled, sliding into the car and propping his feet on the passenger seat, spinning the dated paper map in his hands. “Now how the hell do we get out of here? I think I’ve developed an arrhythmia from the lack of wifi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *I borrowed this line from Winter Soldier #12 by Ed Brubaker. It is just so horrifying and beautiful all at once. It sticks with me whenever I think about Bucky's past.


End file.
